Pendragon's Heir

by Suzannah Rowntree

  “The obsidian knife,” Branwen said, waving it at Blanchefleur. “You should wear this.”

  Blanchefleur took it gingerly. “Do you think so? For everyday use? Isn’t it too fine?”

  “Of course it is. I don’t mean you should use it. But with that knife you defeated Morgan le Fay. It would be like carrying her head with you.”

  Blanchefleur laughed. “Ugh!”

  “So that no one forgets who you are.”

  “If you say so.” At that moment a knock sounded on the outer door, and Blanchefleur opened the door to Perceval.

  “Come into the garden and talk,” he said, gathering her into his arm. To Branwen he added, “You’ll find Heilyn with Sir Culhwch in the hall. They want to see you when you are ready.”

  Branwen said, “Oo!” and looked at Blanchefleur with wide and eager eyes.

  “Go, go,” Blanchefleur told her, pulling her cloak around her shoulders. As Branwen darted down the corridor ahead of them, she said to Perceval, “She hopes they’ve set a wedding date.”

  Perceval looked wry. “It’s a harder business than you might think. Especially when the marriage is an affair of state.”

  “So it won’t be today for us?”

  “It would be if I had a say in it. But the furthest your father will commit himself is to having his council approve a contract of betrothal by Sunday.”

  He pushed open a door and they went through into the icy garden. Blanchefleur sighed in disappointment and then said, “What a goose I am! Two days ago I was afraid you no longer cared for me. This afternoon it seems hard that I cannot marry you within the hour.”

  She slipped her arm through Perceval’s and leaned her head on his shoulder as they went down a path with frosty leaves crackling underfoot. “I am so glad about the King—about Father and Mother. Will there be a retrial, do you know?”

  “Your mother wants it. When Mordred is found.”

  “You don’t think the new verdict would be in doubt?”

  “I do not. With Mordred a fugitive, things that seemed certain a month ago are like daydreams today.”

  A hawk drifting in the sky to the south, above the forest, screamed. Blanchefleur smiled, lifted her face to the sun, and sniffed fresh cold air. “I am so glad! Yesterday, it seemed like everything had ended.”

  But Perceval shook his head. “Brothers of the Table have killed each other in battle, Blanchefleur. Perhaps you cannot feel it, but I can. A chill in the air. This peace is brittle as glass. One careless knock, and—” he made a scattering gesture. “All the King’s work. All these years. His pride and joy—and it is no more. It has already gone.”

  Blanchefleur could not help shivering. Her mind went down gloomy paths; at last she said, “What is your father doing?”

  “Sitting in the chapel by his kin.” Perceval’s voice froze. “He would not allow me to set foot over the threshold.”

  “Oh, Perceval.”

  “I went to speak to Lynet instead,” he went on. “She yet barely comprehends what has happened. I have seen it before. There is a kind of elation in the first blow of grief. In three or four months she will begin to understand the meaning of gone. That will be harder.”

  “And you?”

  He smiled wearily. “I continually forget what has happened. Remembering is like waking in the waste from dreams of food and warmth.”

  They walked on in silence for a few steps. Blanchefleur said, “And your father?”

  “I cannot tell what good he thinks it does to be angry.”

  Blanchefleur picked her words carefully. “He was not the only angry man in the King’s pavilion yesterday, dearest.”

  Perceval’s jaw set. “One only has so much patience.”

  “I know, but…Didn’t you hear what he said, about King Lot?”

  “Grandfather has nothing to do with this.”

  Again she felt distance between them. And only the previous morning they had understood each other so perfectly.

  But she had her own secrets, and she could not reproach him for his reserve if she kept hers. Blanchefleur said, “There’s one thing I haven’t told anyone, Perceval. About Sarras.”

  He nodded, but his voice came from far away, as though he was thinking of other things. “Yes?”

  “I knew Mordred was Morgan’s secret master because when I asked who, she showed me into her memories. Showed me that she had had a son.”

  Perceval nodded again. “You said so.”

  “Yes. But there was one other thing.” Blanchefleur took a deep breath. “She told me, more or less, that—that the King was the child’s father.”

  Perceval turned to her with a gesture of disbelief. “Of course she did! …What, exactly, did she show you?”

  “Only the two of them walking together, years ago. And then Morgan leaving Camelot with her baby. And then she said that, if it comforted me at all, they did not know then that they were brother and sister.”

  “I will not believe it,” Perceval said. “A brother and sister may walk together, surely.”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t what she meant.”

  “I do not believe the King would do it.”

  “You didn’t believe your father would be angry with you for fighting for Lancelot.”

  Perceval almost flinched. Blanchefleur said, “Oh, Perceval, forgive me. I just—need someone to tell me what to think about this. If it is true. You heard what Agravain said yesterday. Perceval, it’s been preying on my mind for a whole year, and I haven’t told a soul.”

  Their feet crunched through dead leaves. Blanchefleur shortened her step to match Perceval’s limp. He said at last, “I know what you mean. If the King…if he…”

  “…then it doesn’t matter what Mother did. None of it matters. Logres is a lie.”

  Perceval’s voice was husky. “No. Not a lie.”

  “There are times when I’m convinced she must have been telling the truth. Anything Morgan says is like a nut—you must crack the shell of falsehood to get at the kernel of truth. She has been a liar so long I don’t believe she could give a straight warning to anyone, even when she so desperately wanted to warn me about Mordred. But what if there’s a kernel of truth to what she says about the King?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “And then there are times when I think it all impossible. Does it not seem impossible to you?”

  “Of course.” Perceval squeezed his eyes shut. At last he said, “Yet there is the resemblance.”

  “You saw it too.”

  “I could never tell who Mordred reminded me of,” he said. “The King? Or someone else? It was, in the end, Simon Corbin. But Simon Corbin is the King’s own image.”

  Crunch-crunch. Crunch-crunch.

  Blanchefleur said, “He’s trying to kill me so he can inherit Logres.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why.”

  “But a bastard cannot inherit, and Logres split and weakened is no great patrimony.” Perceval smiled down at her. “Let us hope! When Mordred is caught and questioned, the whole hard truth will come out.”

  Blanchefleur ducked her head and kept her eyes on the path. At last, almost in a whisper, she said: “Do we want it to?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Even if it’s true? That Mordred is the King’s son?” Blanchefleur pressed her lips together. “If it’s true, he’s been lying to us. Everything he’s said or done for the last twenty-five years, a lie…” Her eyes were suddenly hot with tears. “Or even if we knew the truth, what could I do? How could I denounce him? Perceval, it’s my father.”

  He looked at her with a pain that mirrored her own. “God knows, Blanchefleur! If I knew, I would tell you!”

  “But it isn’t just me. He’s been a father to all of Logres. Was it all for nothing? The Table? The Quest?”

  “Never,” he said, but his voice was ragged and weak. He cleared his throat. “Never. Logres is greater than one man. Greater than you or me, and greater than the King. Oh, Blanc
hefleur, I weep for the Table. There were a hundred of us on the Pentecost before the Quest. Now only sixty-two of the sieges have names on them, and a third of those are exiled to Wales with Lancelot. Even so there are enough of us left to keep Logres alight.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, to the castle. “Or even if all of us perished…”

  “Or even if all of us sinned as badly.”

  Perceval fell silent. “Yes,” he said at last, and the words seemed to cost him some effort. “Even if all of us sinned. If we all turned aside and went astray. If we fell into ruin and the shadow of death together, Logres would go on, even if we were no more.”

  Blanchefleur said, very quietly, “Do you think that will happen?”

  He passed his hand over his eyes. “Who can tell? But I have seen into your world, many years into the future, and I saw Logres there. It was wavering, perhaps even dying. But that is the pattern of the Kingdom. It will always be dying. But it will live forever. It was founded on another and greater King even than the High King of Britain.”

  A breeze picked at Blanchefleur’s hair. She closed her eyes and breathed in. “You make me hope.”

  “That is why, in the end, it makes no difference how our fathers have sinned,” he continued. “We know that the hearts of men are wicked. We have known it since the beginning. But shall Logres be utterly thwarted by the sins of man?”

  Blanchefleur said: “Not forever; not when all is said and done. But in our time, perhaps…”

  “Yes.” Perceval stood stock-still, and Blanchefleur watched his struggle in anxious silence. “In our time…Omnes enim peccaverunt…” He drew his arm from her grasp. “Dear heart, I need to go.”

  “To speak to your father.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned his back on her and went without another word. But Blanchefleur no longer felt the distance lying between them like a wound.

  34

  I will weep for thee;

  For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like

  Another fall of man.

  Shakespeare

  PERCEVAL MET HEILYN IN THE PASSAGE. “I came to find you,” the squire told him. “They are burying Gareth and Gaheris tonight. Did you know of it?”

  “Lynet told me, but at first I thought it best to stay away.” Perceval turned and looked out the door into the garden, where the slanting sunlight had already diminished, leaving the sky cold and leaden. “So late,” he murmured, and strode ahead of Heilyn toward the chapel.

  The little high-ribbed room was already full of people holding off the dark with tapers. On the threshold Perceval turned to Heilyn. “Go in. I’ll wait here.”

  He sank back into the shadows in the corner of the door. Latecomers passed by, apparently without noticing him. Perceval folded his arms, let his chin sink upon his chest, and listened through the breathing and shuffling of the crowd to the words of the funeral service. He knew the words well; his lips moved with the prayer.

  “Receive, O Lord, the souls of thy servants. Free them from the principalities of darkness so that they be born into eternal blessing of quiet and light, and deserve to be resuscitated among thy saints and elect in the glory of the Resurrection, through our Lord Jesu Christ, thy son, who with thee lives and reigns together with the Holy Spirit, through all ages of ages. Amen.”

  A good prayer for the living, too, thought Perceval. In these days of confusion and strife, in these days of sin and foolishness, his soul longed for some assurance of eternal peace.

  “Do not enter into judgement with thy servants, for before thee, no man is justified, unless all of his sins have been granted forgiveness by thee. Therefore we beseech thee, that they do not bear thy condemnation who are sustained by thy grace. May these be worthy to evade the condemnation of vengeance, who lived marked with the sign of the Trinity, through our Lord Jesu Christ, thy son, who with thee lives and reigns together with the Holy Spirit, through all ages of ages. Amen.”

  Life marked with the sign of the Trinity. What did it look like? How could he know a thing that nothing in the world could fully manifest? But already his lips were answering:

  “Pour forth thy mercy on thy dead servants, O Lord, that they not receive the condemnation unto punishment because of their works. May thy mercy join them to the angelic chorus through our Lord Jesu Christ, thy son, who with thee lives and reigns together with the Holy Spirit, through all ages of ages. Amen.”

  Perceval waited. The coffins went down into the crypt; the flagstones grated within the chapel, covering two of the four brothers of Orkney. At last, one by one, the people began to leave: brothers-at-arms, lords, servants, merchant-men and craftsmen from the town. Only the King, with Sir Kay on his right hand and Sir Bedivere on his left, paused when he saw Perceval standing in the shadows.

  He said nothing, only gripped Perceval by hand and by shoulder, smiling with pitying eyes. Then they moved on and Perceval stood looking after the King of Britain until his upright figure had vanished.

  With a formless disbelief he remembered what he and Blanchefleur had discussed in the dead garden that afternoon. “It can’t be,” he told himself, and turned to see Heilyn in the doorway.

  The squire nodded to Perceval, gesturing toward the chapel. Within, no more than two or three other men remained speaking to Gawain in low voices, and when Perceval’s step sounded on the threshold, they left as if by some unspoken agreement, so that at last only the Knight of Orkney and his son remained.

  Gawain, seeing Perceval, folded his arms and thrust out his jaw. “Well?”

  Perceval went down on his knees on the threshold. “Sir, forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “For the angry words I spoke yesterday. For my insolent mood. For grieving you in taking part with Lancelot. I might have refrained from the battle altogether…”

  “Yes.” The word was an accusation. Perceval gritted his teeth on a dragon’s-breath of ire and said:

  “Have I your forgiveness, sir?”

  “Come and swear on your kinsmen’s graves that you will avenge them,” Gawain said, holding out his hand.

  “Alas!” Perceval said, not moving. “This would be to disobey God and king.”

  Gawain laughed, short and sharp. “Then weary me no longer with your pretended remorse.”

  “You intend to fight Lancelot?” Perceval asked.

  “You know I do.”

  “I beg you will not. Hear me. He has grieved you and greatly offended. But he is exiled for his crime, and can you desire any harsher punishment for a man of the Table and a brother? Sir, you have been the King’s right hand and second only to Lancelot among the champions of Logres. I have borne your device and your name, and both have won me greater honour than I have gained myself. Do not blot your name nor your conscience with this deed. Do not spill Lancelot’s blood, or it will be a grief and a shame to you in days to come that you have avenged yourself unlawfully, who have never borne blemish nor blame before.”

  Gawain was staring at the stones and the names on the chapel floor. At last he said, “No. The true dishonour would lie in failing to avenge the blood of my kin. Also I have sworn to ride out tonight, by oaths that I dare not break.”

  “And yet Lancelot was your friend, dear as a brother. Can you not forgive him?”

  “Forgive him?” Gawain looked up at Perceval, and his eyes were dark with pain. “But he was a brother to me. That is what I cannot forgive. I have lost kinsmen before. I have lost friends before. But never at the hand of a brother.”

  Perceval waited.

  Gawain began to pace the floor. “Lancelot! The best of us! Everyone said it. I believed it. I believed in him!…

  “The best of us! If I were the only man he had wronged, I could forgive him! They say, ‘Forgive’…They say…

  “They do not understand. He did not only betray Gaheris, his brother-at-arms; he did not only betray Gareth, who loved him better than his own life. Not only me. Oh, God bear me witness, if I were the only one, I could forgive
him!…

  “No, he betrayed all of us. He brought destruction to the Table. He took up arms against the gentlest King in the world. The best of us! And Logres is destroyed on his account!”

  Gawain looked at Perceval despairingly. “Only his blood can wash out the reproach he has brought upon Logres. Logres, the kingdom of light, brought under darkness by his frailty.”

  Perceval said: “I understand…”

  Gawain held out his hand, and his voice pled. “Join me.”

  Perceval rose to his feet. “I said I understand. But I cannot join you. Logres is not a kingdom of light, not yet. And Lancelot is not the only one of us who has sinned.”

  Father and son stood for a long moment looking at each other. Then Gawain dropped his outstretched hand, and it was as if icy doors slammed between them.

  “Do as you like. You told me you intended to go your own way. Well. I will go mine.”

  He brushed past Perceval in the doorway and was gone.

  PERCEVAL DID NOT SEE HIS FATHER again until the night of Heilyn and Branwen’s wedding, at Christmas, two weeks later. When the feast was ended and the floor of the great hall cleared for dancing, Perceval went looking for Blanchefleur, whose seat at the high table in the gallery was, for the moment, empty.

  These days she spent nearly all her time with the King, poring over books and chess-tables and case-law. Meanwhile Perceval was busy on his own errands. To him the King had given the pursuit of Mordred, and there were scouts to send out and reports to hear. And yesterday, although the hunt for Mordred took place of first importance, he had sent out another man to find Sir Caradoc, of whom no news had come since he had set out from Joyeuse Gard toward the land of the Silver Dragon.

  “Take care,” he had told Caradoc. “Watch and learn what you can, but do not attempt the chastisement of Sir Breunis alone. I would not risk you in this, but so many of the brothers of the Table are yet young and untried.”